[URBAN NOTE] "Liberals' Toronto foundation crumbles"

[rfmcdonald]

As you may have gathered, the signal fact of yesterday's election in Toronto is the collapse of the Liberal Party. blogTO's maps illustrate this, the first one showing the results of the 2008 federal election, the second yesterday's. Red represents the Liberals, orange the NDP, blue the Conservatives.





The Globe and Mail captures the significance of this in text. Brief version? The Liberals are screwed. The article even cites my Davenport riding as an example of this.

Before election night, it was thought that the Liberal Party could save face as long as it clung to the 21 Toronto ridings that have served as the party’s intellectual and electoral nucleus stretching as far back as the governments of Lester Pearson.

But Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff lost his seat and the party lost other key ridings belonging to stalwarts Joe Volpe, Ken Dryden and Gerard Kennedy.

“This is the capital of the English Liberal Party in the country,” said Stephen Clarkson, University of Toronto professor and author of Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics. “A rout in Toronto, it’s devastating for the prospects of the Liberal Party recovering its national standing.”

The phenomena that worked against the Liberals on election night: a late surge in popularity for Jack Layton that landed NDP candidates in Parkdale-High Park and Davenport and several other ridings, a Conservative election machine that conscripted the services of Mayor Rob Ford in targeting seats where Grit support was believed to be soft, and then a combination of the two where vote splitting between Liberals and NDP allowed a Conservative candidate to come up the middle.

In Toronto, the bellwether for the NDP’s history-making fortunes was Davenport. The riding has been considered a Grit entitlement for decades, passing faithfully from Pearson-era finance minister Walter Gordon to Charles Caccia, who held it for nearly 40 years before incumbent Mario Silva took it over.

The man that upset that era of Liberal dominance is NDPer Andrew Cash, a musician running in his first election. At Mr. Cash’s campaign celebration, cheers erupted as the candidate swept the polls. Eric Double said Mr. Cash got his vote for his energy and personal politics. “I'm interested in him fighting for the rights of people like me.”